Why did Anakin Skywalker fall? And who is to blame? Or is the better question, who's responsible? And what do we do with that information? On a recent episode of my Star Wars Generations podcast, we were talking about Revenge of the Sith and this topic of you know, who is responsible for the fall of Anakin? Is it Anakin? Is it the Jedi? Is
it Palpatine? Is it all of them? Came up and I realized that we had a fun discussion of it, but it's a much deeper conversation that I wanted to talk to Riki about, and Anakin Skywalker is kind of the chief example, but it's something we talk about a lot in comics of and superhero movies, is when we get a villain's backstory, when we get their villain origin story, it leads questions of can we be sympathetic to them? And now who is to blame? Is it their fault that they became a
villain? Is it the circumstances they were under? How do we deal with all that and how do we how do these questions affect the way we see things in our own lives. As always for this my co host for today is Riki Hayashi. Riki, how are we doing today? You know, this is a very interesting topic, Matthew, so I'm glad you brought it to this podcast as well. Obviously we're both I mean, you're obviously a fan of Star Wars, but I think some people might not know that I
am a huge Star Wars fan as well. I've been a guest on the other Actually, I think we just released the bad Batch summary. Right, you were a guest, but also you and your partner Sarah were co hosts, I think the longest running co hosts of the Star Wars podcast for a while. Yeah, I mean, Star Wars is very close near and dear to my heart, and questions like this are on one level, very simple,
splistic, but can lead to good discussion. Agreed. Agreed, And so let me actually start by saying, when it comes to we're gonna I understand on that other podcast we did longer conversation about Anakin, and this isn't as much us discussing who's responsible or to blame for Anakin as much as as us talking about how we frame that question. But I'll start by giving you a chance to talk about, you know, why did Anakin fall and who
in your mind is responsible or to blame? Yeah, that the fundamental like wordplay here, responsible to me, only one person is responsible, Anakin Skywalker for his actions, right right, Like personal responsibility I think is very important, but also from a fictional historical perspective, you want to be able to assign blame for incidents like this the fall of the Republic, right like Anakin is responsible for his own actions killing Jedi and probably like other crimes as Darth
Vader. But like the bigger picture here is the Republic fell, the Jedi order fell, and who's to blame for that? Right Like he had a hand in some of that, in the incident in Palpatine's office with mace In helping to execute Order sixty six by assaulting the Jedi Temple. But it's very rare that one being can solely be, you know, blamed for historically significant
events, Right, That makes sense. I think I look at this through a slightly different lens in that I do think responsibility is important, and I think you're right that Anakin is responsible for the choices he makes, but also there are a number of other people that make choices that create the situation that Anakin is the person who he is and he's in that situation when he makes
those choices. And I guess this is kind of my central idea with all of this is that I think blame is a really is a really problematic direction to go because it really looks for the idea of if we find one person to blame, that means that everybody else is off the hook, or we have to say that these two people are equally to blame, or then it gets to a conversation of, oh, if you say these two are equally to blame, should it actually be more like seventy thirty or something like that.
And to me, all those conversations are about trying to figure out like who did the wrong thing? And when I look at a situation like Anakin's for me both within the story but also outside the story in terms of how we learn from it in our own lives, I think what I come down to is I really want to figure it out, like for each of the different characters and each of the different institutions, what level of responsibility to they have, not for the perspective of blame, but for the perspective of how
can they learn to make to do something better at the next time. Does that make sense as a framework? Sure? I also like another word I would use in this context is accountability. Yeah, in that the republic fell, was replaced by the emperor or the empire, and then in the future
we get the new republic. And if this were like a real world, if this were real governments, presumably there would be some kind of trials right to hold people accountable for the empire, like war crimes trials, and we we usually don't get a lot of that in like the fictionalized Star Wars universe. Yeah, but if you if you were to examine it from that perspective,
like who do you hold accountable? Right? And then like you look at Anakin and what he did, and undred percent like he if they have the death penalty, he's probably getting the death penalty for the things he did. You know, Palpatine, the same thing the Jedi, you know, like Yoda, I don't like Yoda is obviously not gonna get get the death penalty. But you look at how people are held accountable for mistakes in the
real world. I mean, like real world examples like nine to eleven BEng Ghazi, Like they hold inquiries and in some cases like put people on trial for mistakes that were made that led to bad outcomes, right, And I think there's a very real possibility that Yoda and or the Jedi Council would be held accountable, would be would be put on trial and held to account for the mistakes that they made that led to the empire, that led to Palpatine
taking over, because they you know, they cover things up, they lied to the Senate, et cetera, etcetera. Those are things that they should be held accountable for. I think that's a really good way of looking at it, with that accountability idea. And I get that you're looking at through that that courtroom punishment thing, and like, you know, even in our own world, you have a teen shooter or some other you know, a
young person or a young adult. Anakin is not I think he's like nineteen or twenty, so he might technically be a teenager, but he is a legal adult in this world. But he's still clearly quite young. And yeah, so he might be put on trial for his actions. I think you can certainly say that Palpatine is a groomer, you know, to use that kind of modern parlance. And then in the same way that like you know,
schools missing all the warning signs about a kid can get sued. I think the same thing could happen here because for me, and I guess here's what I'm focusing, not even as much on the fall of the Republic, but just specifically the choices Anakin makes, because what I see is kind of three levels of that responsibility. That first level is Anakin himself. He is the person who makes those choices. He's not you know, he is making
those choices himself. He chooses to go against Mace. At some later point, you might want to argue that the dark Side is like a mythical you know, I don't think we know enough about the exact workings of it to know to what extent is he legally responsible, but certainly he chooses to go down that path in his attack on Mace. Then you can say, okay, well, what responsibility does Palpatine have? And I know I often hear
this groomer language used a lot. And here's again when I think it becomes very easy for it to become a zero sum question of people who want to give more blame to Palpatine therefore want to let Anakin completely off the hook. And to me, that's the wrong. I think Palpatine directly influences Anakin's choices, but Anakin still makes the choices. And then for the Jedi's perspective, I think Anakin is a person who is very vulnerable to Palpatine's manipulation and very
likely to make a bad decision. And I think that's all a lot of that is can be. The Jedi should be held accountable in some ways for all the mistakes they make in terms of never giving a chance to grieve the loss of his mother and repressing all of his emotions and all the things that they do that help make him into the person who makes those choices, you know. And so I kind of see it's these three different levels of what
brings Anakin to the point that he's at when he makes those decisions. Yeah, I think we are approaching this from from different perspectives, right, Like
you're very Anakin focused and I'm kind of more like system focused. Right, So when you talk when you talk about like the incident in Palatine's office with Mace, I would look at that from I guess like a legalistic perspective of what he did and Mace in that moment, Mace was about to execute Palpatine, right, like I do we agree on that, yes, he lifted his lightsaber to strike him down, and that they had like an exchange of like he should stand trial, like no, he's too dangerous, Like I
don't remember if Mace says I have to kill him, but he like he has to be eliminated or something like that. So he makes his intention clearly he's going to murder Palpatine, which is not is not legal, right, Like he's taking an extra judiciary action to and making his own declaration Like I'm
the judge, surey executioner in this case. And so I think from like a legalistic like if this were quote unquote real, from a legalistic standpoint, I don't think what Anakin did was wrong in that moment, right, like in terms of response or accountability, Like, I think what Anakin did was
kind of the right thing to do. Now we know because it's fiction that he the Palpatine was manipulating the whole situation, right, he could have forced Lightning and Mason at any point, but he was looking to get Anakin to commit this action to kind to be on his side. So that's a very interesting perspective, And I I do think you're right that what Mace Windu is doing is you know, extra legal. He's taking the law into his own hands. And you can argue about whether he's right or not in terms of
Palpatine's ability to stand trial. But then this is the problem with vigilante cops and all that kind of a thing. Also, personally, I think Mace is criminally responsible for negligence for the ridiculous I'm going to pull my lightsaber all the way back and give Anakin thirty seconds to decide if he wants to cut my hand off or not. I think, though, the idea that Anakin
is acting properly would only make sense if he then stopped. If he stops Mace from killing Palpatine, but then he also like tries to use his lightsaber to stop Palpatine from killing Mace, you know, because he doesn't, he leaves Mace incredibly vulnerable to Palpatine, and then when Palpatine kills Mace, he does nothing. And to me, that's where it is clear, to me at least, that Anakin's concern there is not that what Mace is doing is
illegal or wrong. It's that he needs Palpatine alive for his own selfish purposes of keeping Padme alive, and and so it's harder for me to just and that he's perfectly fine with Palpatine killing Mace, and so it's harder for me. And then in his mind that leads to the what have I done? Like he I think certainly sees it not that he did the right thing, but that he, in that act, has irrevocably chosen Palpatine and the Sith
and the dark side. Yeah, well, I I think I agree in general, Like the main thing is, like he disarms Mace literally right, like he cuts his hand off, but he his action is meant to incapacitate Mace's ability to kill Palpatine. Palpatine's ability to kill Mace was unexpected, for both Mace and for Anakin. Like shooting the force lightning and sending him flying out the window was not I don't think anyone really included the audience, I
really expected that to happen in that moment. So I don't know, I mean worse lightening him before I thought that. I was not surprised. Oh no, no, you're right, You're right right either way, I think we're getting a little bit too locked into that legalism of that one particular moment, I I guess for me what I'm trying. And even if we don't talk about the decision with Mace, it's also you know, then he goes and attacks the temple and all that, and then he starts on this dark
path that is all these terrible things. And I think we can have a larger conversation, but who's responsible for the fall of the Republic, And maybe let's do that next. I guess what I'm just getting at is I feel like when the conversation is that it's that because we can put a lot of I like this idea of accountability instead of either blame or responsibility on both the
Jedi and Palpatine, that that's somehow lets Anakin off the hook. And and to me, that's where this idea of everyone is responsible for their own actions.
And I at least think, especially when it comes to our own world, that it's important to be able to hold this tension that we can both say people make their own choices and are responsible for those choices, but also a lot of other people made choices that put people in that position, you know, and that that the point, like when we look at young men who you know, commit horribly violent crimes, you know, teen shooters and
stuff, but also just people born in bad circumstances and the like. We can often look at the circumstances they come from and decisions that were made. Or when we're talking about this on the Star Wars podcast, Aaron was talking about how she listens to true crime all the time, and almost all the people they talk about were horribly abused as children and then turn out to be
these horrible people as adults. But of course lots and lots and lots of other people are treated badly as children and do not turn out to do that. And so the idea being kind of that, I think to me that we can hold this tension of saying if the Jedi had been a lot smarter in how they had helped raise Anakin, I think it is almost impossible,
very unlikely that Anakin makes the choices that he does. But still it is, at the end of the day, like Anakin is the person who makes those choices, and he is responsible for those choices, but the person he is is largely formed by the Jedi and by Palpatine and others, and so accountability can go to everyone I so again like Anakin is responsible for his own
actions. I think what you're getting at is that there are kind of like divergent points where we can see if someone other than Anakin had done something differently, we can imagine a different outcome. Is that kind of where you're getting
at? Well, Like, I'll give you one example. I think if obi Wan had been more open to we have a lot of evidence in the texts, particularly in some of the books that came later, but even in the movies that Anakin had some suspicion about Sorry, obi Wan had some suspicion about Anakin and Padme, but never actually talked to him about it, as well as the idea that by this time Anakin certainly feels like that the Jedi
would not allow his relationship with Padme. In a situation that is not so you know, strict and repressive, or at least where obi Wan has talked to him. In a world where an doesn't feel like he has to keep his relationship with Padme a secret, he's much more likely to talk to some of those people and talk about the dreams he's having, so that Palpatine isn't
the only one who he's listening to. Like it's been a while, but I studied a lot about how groomers work and things like that, and one of the things that really gets talked about a lot is that groomers often are able to focus on kids who feel like they are outsiders, often because they're not being listened to at home or at school, or they're not having, you know, other places in their life where they feel like people respect them
and and and are you know, being treating them well. And so when someone starts saying, oh, no, I think you're actually great, no one, you know, it's so sad that no one listens to you. They become very responsible to that potentially manipulative groomer person. And to me, that's exactly what I see with Anakin. Like I don't think he's anywhere near as responsive to Palpatine if the Jedi treat him better, Okay, But like I guess where we're going is like, what are you holding the Jedi responsible
for? Well? I guess that's what I mean is I think it's a great question because this is kind of where we have to find new language, I think, and we're using Anakin as example. I think there's other people we can talk about as well. Kingpin, I think is another great one, but also any hero where we're given enough of their sympathetic backstory that we have to sort of ask about it. I think that if the Jedi are putting people like Anakin or Eve embarrassing in the situations like this, it's not
a question of to what extent are they legally responsible? Can they be sued? Can any of them go to jail? Like to me, I would want the Jedi, after Anakin or however they're being rebuilt by Luke, to be able to say we failed Anakin. Anakin made his own choices, but in part that's because we failed him. How can we do better that?
That, to me is the really important question is because I think if you just say, oh, Anakin was his own man, he made his own choices, or it was all Palpatine, that means the Jedi don't have to do any in any work on themselves. And I guess that's what I'm really coming to is I want everyone involved to be saying, yes, other people responsible too, but what did we do wrong? And how could we fix it for next time? Yeah, and the interesting like one one perspective I
might give on that is, don't let Anakin be a Jedi. Yeah, I think it's weird, as weird as we like think of the he's too old thing with Anakin, and maybe like the Jedi were doctrinating kids at a very young age. The fact of the matter is, like, based on their established order and their rules and all that, he shouldn't have been a Jedi, right, Yeah, that's part of the problem here, is that he broke the mold, and that's why to some degree they didn't know what
to do with him. Yeah, and even up to the point where he's falling in love with Padme and is hiding it and is not sure what to do, he himself could have made the decision to leave the Jedi Order at that point and just marry Padme. Yeah, and imagine if obi Wan had been willing to sit down with him and say, hey, look what happened with me and the Duchess Setene. I know that I could have chosen not
to. I could have chosen to give up the order for her, and I in some level did, and of course the terrible thing happened and Maul killed her and just sat down with him and said, hey, this is a choice. You should make, but acknowledged it as something that he could have done or thought about. This is a weird analogy, I realized.
But one of the things I think about a lot is that a lot of groomors, especially when it's you know, more sexual in nature, really thrive in situations a very very restrictive sex at where kids are not being told anything about their bodies. Kids are not being you know, they're just told abstinence first, absence first. You know, all those desires are sinful and wrong,
you should just ignore them. And so they start looking elsewhere. They go on the internet and start talking to people in chat rooms who may be you know, older predatory people or they I'm painting this horrible picture again. A lot of times people just find information they need. But you know, a kid who's being given healthy, age appropriate sex ed material, Yeah, I mean all kids are probably not all, but you know a lot of kids are abaus. They're going to go look online for peorgn or whatever.
But that person's not as they're not as needing you know, some outside person to answer the questions that no one else will answer for them. And not exactly the same with anakin. But it feels kind of similar to me, that he had all of these feelings about Padme and he had no one to
talk to about it. And I think you make a really good point about the no one knows what to do with it, because to me, there's a direct link to his feelings about Padme and not knowing what to do with it his feelings about his mother and obi Wan can you know kind of I don't think he meant it to be cruel. But when obi Wan just sort of says, you know, Anakin, you need to let go of your
attachment to your mother. You need to just live in the moment, you know, it feels like someone who hasn't had a parent, you know, hasn't lost a parent, saying to someone, oh, just get over it. Obi Wan never had an attachment like that as a kid that he had to let go of when he was nine years old, and so obi Wan does. He's not able to relate to Anakin, and he's not able to understand why it's so hard for Anakin to let go of this. Yeah,
I have thoughts. I'm trying to organize my thoughts. Go for it the obi Wan thing. Yes, So I don't know, I lost my thoughts I'll just say there's a there's a huge irony here in that. On the Star Wars podcast, I was one of the ones being like, no, no, no, this, we've got to talk about Anakin be responsible because the one of my get one of my co hosts there describes themselves as an Anakin apologist. And I was very much on the like, no, no, no, this is to me, We're still very much on it is
Anakin's fault. He makes the choices he makes. It's not just Palpatine. He's making a lot of bad choices throughout the Clone Wars, you know, getting insanely jealous over padme is you know, former flirtation, killing people like you know, killing all this, the Tuscans like, none of this isn't any way to defend Anakin. It's just to say that. I guess here's maybe another way to say it. When Anakin chooses the dark side, I think we have to To me, the better question is not who's to blame,
it's why does he choose the dark side? And yes, he is the one making the choice, it's his responsibility, but lots of other people don't make that choice. Luke doesn't make that choice. And I think we could just say, well, that's just because Luke is a better person than Anakin and Anakin is just a bad person. But to me, that's a really dangerous road to go down, because then all of us can say, oh, we're just better than Anakin. We don't have to confront the fact
that we might have made that same choice too under different circumstances. So for me, it becomes really important to ask, what are the factors that helped
make Anakin into the person that would make that choice? Yeah, And what I would say is that someone someone can be a victim of circumstances and an object of sympathy, a tragic figure as we I think we might portray Anakin Skywalker, but that same person, it is also the perpetrator of more harm, right, right, And I don't think it needs to be a one
or the other. Like one leads one leads to the other. And we can be sympathetic to the character Anakin Skywalker and say it sucks that his mom died, It sucks that you know, he had these dreams about his wife dying and and all of that. Those are the stepping stones that lead to his his falls of the dark side. But he's the one that falls right, Like he is the one who commits the atrocities, and nothing, nothing
in his circumstances should excuse his crimes. They explain them, I think is the best way to put it. And so like being an Anakin apologist, like, I think that is as much a part of a consequence of discourse, right if the discourse of fandom is like Anakin's a villain, he's to blame, like he's the worst. Yeah, you can have a conversation where like these, these are the circumstances that led him to be become this monster, right, And I think that makes for compelling, more compelling narratives as
well. So it's good to explore that. I've got a lot of responses there, and we're gonna get right into that right after this. We're starting the conversation. But we want to hear from you. Send your thoughts, questions, or anything else you want to hear discuss to feedback at the Ethical panda dot com or you can find us on Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok under the Ethical Panda. You can even chat with us on discord or Facebook.
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the show notes and now back to our episode. Welcome back everyone. I want to keep talking about this, and I'm there's a lot to say about Anakin, but I wondered if we could broaden out to a couple of other characters to throw into the mix. And I want to start Riki with a show that you and I both love and have talked about a lot, Avatar The Last Airbender. Because let's know, the characters of Zuko and Azula. Zuka and Azula are both the children of Firelord Ozi. Fire Lord Ozi is,
you know, incredibly abusive, both physically and emotionally. He pushes his kids to terrible directions, and a lot of the terrible things that they both do are in large part I think you can directly trace them to the kind of up bringing they have. Now Zooko gets exposed to some really good people, especially Uncle Iro, but also just the Avatar gang themselves, and winds up kind of having his villain turn, but then his hero turn in a way Azula never really does. M H. Where do you place blame for
the two of them? Or again bring up a whole conversation of blame, responsibility or accountability, you know, and especially they're they're like literal teenagers, not you know, at least kind of past the agent majority. Not that it's that significant, but I legally it is. Where where would you kind of put the two of them in this conversation? I think I would apply the same kind of framework in that they're responsible for their own actions even though
they are teenagers. Like in a lot of these fictionalized worlds, teenagers do a lot of things that are larger than life, whether it's on the good side or the bad side. So we kind of have to accept that that's a thing. And perhaps, you know, like being tried as a minor might not be as much of a thing in a world where if the military gives you, if the military gives you command authority, then you're like it's
it's it's it's problematic, like for for framing hm. But but in this world, like, yeah, both Zuko and Azula as teenagers are given command of some number of troops and do things in in the War two, you know, perpetrate violence against other states and people. So I think they should
they are, they are accountable for those actions as individuals, right. Can we also look and say that the circumstances in which they were raised had quite a lot to do with with them becoming the people who made those choices. Yeah, And I think like if they were held to, you know, some kind of trial, that that would probably come into it because they are
so young and put in these situations. I do think it's reasonable, like under the circumstances to say, yeah, there are definitely mitigating circumstances of their upbringing, and especially like the way that they are thrust into these military positions right. Well, And to me, one of the most interesting questions about them is now we're not just talking about the villain turn that they both take,
but the hero turn that one of them takes. And you know, we only have the story as it's written to us, and Zuko is much more of a point of view character where's Azula is really just kind of the presented as villainous, although I think we're supposed to also feel some sympathy for her. To be sure, do you think that if Azula had spent a year uncle Iro that she might have made any of the kind of hero turns that Zuko did or is there just something fundamentally different about because on the one
hand, like I feel like Zuko gets that very different moral influence. On the other hand, when they're both children at the Emperor's palace, like Azula is still like, you know, fairly sadistic and maybe responsible for, you know, the banishment or death of their mother all this kind of stuff.
Yeah, Okay, that's never addressed, right. Yeah, at the end of the show, the original show, I think Zuko says like he's gonna go find his mother or something like that, And I think there are some comic books, but yeah, like Azula seems to have had a hand in that in that disappearance. In terms of Iro, like, it's hard you can't just like cut and paste and replace like Zuko with a Zula and say
like, well, what would have happened? Is there there are different people on different paths, And part of the thing with Azula is she shows that ambition early on, which gets the attention of Ozai and why he chose he chooses to focus more of his attention on her at a younger age or to Zuko, not just the ambition but also her abilities as a fire bender.
So it it's it's like, it's very difficult to just say, like, oh, well, what if what if Azula had had the influence of Iro, like she didn't because she was already a different person, and that the two adults in the situation, Ozi and Iro, basically like took each of the kids under their wing because they saw something in them, they reminded them themselves, or you know whatever however you want to frame that. Yeah,
I think that's a really good point there. And it's hard because there's a part of me that wants to be very careful about saying like, oh, you can just tell when children are six years old, who's going to be
a good one and who's gonna be a bad one. And when I see Azula at you know, eight or ten or however old she was, you know, having that naked ambition and that sadism in a lot of ways, especially how she tortures or iould say teases and torments, but clearly with a very cruel streak to it, not a loving, gentle teasing of both her brother and her friends. You know, kids don't just turn out like that. That's that has a lot to do with parenting, That has a lot
to do with the situations that they're raised in. And yeah, so it's it. It kind of goes to a longer store, a larger point that I've been thinking about that I think relates to this, which is that I think when we think about which villains deserve our sympathy, I think there's a danger of sort of think falling into that trap of if the authors or the creators show us a character's backstory, and therefore we can be like, oh, this is why they turned out this way. Okay, there's still the
villain. I still want the hero to defeat them, but I'm sympathetic to them. Whereas when they don't show a backstory, we just assume, Okay, that just means it's just because they're a terrible person, and I think that can be a very effective thing. I think, you know, perhaps one of my favorite, if not my favorite comic book movie The Dark Knight, the second, the Christopher Nolan series, they very intentionally don't give Heath
Ledger's joker in origin story. He actually kind of makes up different origin stories and clearly none of them are true, or at least they're parts all true or whatever. And to me, that's really effective because that we show us like, no, this is not sympathetic evil. This is just someone who is has a complete the different moral framework that is completely amoral, immoral from
anything we understand. But I think there could be a tendency too. If we see the backstory, we have the sympathy, and when we don't, we don't. And I kind of feel like if we had seen moments with Azula before she becomes the person that we see her on screen, you know, when Ozai starts to you know, kind of take take her under his
wing, we might feel very differently towards her. You know, like learning, learning is constant, like growth as people as constant, Like we're talking about these kids, but even as adults, there are moments where something can be reinforced, right, Like good good behavior can be reinforced, bad behavior punished, and like we use that framework to decide like going forward in the future, do I want to continue doing good things or do I want to
continue doing bad things? And bad things is like, you know, it doesn't have to be necessarily like high crimes. I think I would say like speeding, right, like speeding on the highway, going above the speed limit is technically against the law, but we all we all do it, and we do it because when we go over the speed limit, there are no
consequences. We don't you know, if you if you stick within a certain range, you're not going to get pulled over and you're hopefully you're not going to cause an accident, mostly because we're all doing it and doing the same thing that But that's like a very minor example of like a reinforcement like oh, I'm just going to go five miles over the speed limit. Everything's fine, so I'm going to continue to do that. And there, and I
mean and there. What I think I would say is that there is a speed limit that most of us observe, but it's five to ten miles over when it is printed. Yeah, yeah, And that's kind of like driving. Society has kind of evolved past more archaic speed limits, and some places like have up to the speed limit, do to do to those changes some places happen. Yeah, and then of course, like there's always instances where you might get pulled over because a certain area decides to enforce the posted limit
more strictly. Right, and then and then you kind of like if you know that or you discover that, you're like, okay, well, now in this section of highway near this town, I know I have to go slower, right, and we adjust our behavior, and that's you know, that's again like the consequences of that are not earth shattering, Like we're not talking about life or death, well hopefully life or death situations. But I like to think of that as like, yeah, like we we always make
decisions and some are quote unquote good and some are quote unquote bad. But it doesn't you know, I don't think it necessarily casts us as good or bad people, like in the big picture, right, we make certain decisions, but like we should think about them, Like we should think about our decisions why we do them. Like I actually because I'm a jogger and I
like jog on city streets. Like when I'm driving in city areas, I try I tend to go a little slower because I'm very conscious of that, of like being aware of joggers, bikers, pedestrians, and just like the responsibility I have because when I'm jogging, like some people, I'll tell you you just like aren't paying attention and will like cut me off at intersections and stuff, and I'll just like be standing there like that that was very dangerous
that you didn't even look for me. So I try because of my background as a jogger, and you know, yeah, no, I like what you're talking about there, And I think that kind of speaks to this whole idea of that you can both take personal accountability while also recognizing that there's other factors there. I'm going to get very kind of real for a second here,
but this is something I've talked about before. I had a lot of abuse in my childhood and a lot of really problematic situations and have wrestled with a lot of mental health demons because of that. I've been in a great situation for the last couple of years, but especially when I was younger, I was not a great person and made some decisions that really hurt a lot of people. And I can look to the abuse, I can look to
the things that happened to me when I was a kid. The trauma and trace a direct line towards, you know, being the person who was desperately concerned that people would leave me alone and so wound up, you know, without even realizing, kind of being manipulative to people around me, or you know, all these kind of things. And I say without any meaning to because I'm ensemble of it's true. What I'm not saying that to excuse me
at all. It's just more that these become unconscious behaviors. And I always had the option to kind of do more self examination and I didn't, And that's it is my responsibility. I took the actions. The person who I was who made those actions was very formed by a lot of problematic things that
happened in my childhood. And I think that's the thing is is I think we're kind of in this, we're really agreeing, is that we need to be able to have that double double space of saying, you know, unless you are, like you know, at gunpoint, or you know you're being coerced, or like you know, there are lots of things that can take away a person's ability to make choices. And then we can talk about that.
But when you know a person is making a choice, but they're making a choice in part because you know of whatever else they're dealing with, yeah we can still we can say you were accountable for those choices. But also because again, to me, the point shouldn't be, Oh, if you're mad at me for making the choice, No, go be mad at my father, Go be mad at my school system. It's more, yeah,
be mad at me. I made the choices. I hurt people. But also I would hope that, you know, if I were ever a parent, I'd want to be able to look at that and like, what were the choices my father made? How can I break that? And what were the choices his father made and then his father's made. How can I break that cycle? What were the choices that my schooling made in terms of you know, what it tolerated in terms of bullying, And how could I try
to find a school that was different than that or things like that. You know, it's the at the end of the day, I'm not I'm not interested in who to blame. I'm interested in who can change their behavior to prevent these situations happening in the future. M certainly, and I think That's why the Jedi, we use the word blame again, you know, get blamed so much for what happened, Like even though we are saying that Anakin Skywalker is responsible for his own actions, the the Jedi Council, I mean
I said it earlier. They literally lied to the Senate yep, right, And I would say conspired again from like a legal standpoint, I think there was a criminal conspiracy to hide the I think the Jedi were they said they were losing their connection with the force and hence they were unable to detect the Sith, right, I think it was the conversation that happened, and so like they know that there's a Sith Lord somewhere in the galaxy, and I
think they even begin to suspect that they are somewhere like within the halls of power, and they're unable to do anything about it, and they don't tell anyone that they can't and they don't ask for help, right, So that to me, that is the failing of the Jedi, like less So Andakin Skywalker and like teaching him and all that. But it's just like their whole stick of like well, what if we just kind of like bubble around and
don't tell anyone. And I'll certainly say the High Republic books established that this does not start with the prequels, that as far back as two hundred and fifty years ago. You know, most of the people in Clone Wars are not born for another century. But Yoda was certainly around, and there were other issues that came up that that would have really shaken the Republic in the Senate's understanding of the Jedi and even some of the Jedi themselves in terms of
this challenge they faced. And Yoda explicitly decides to keep that a secret and to erase it from the Jedi archives, and not only not tell the Republic of the Senate, but not tell anyone else in the Jedi. And I think that it's very intentionally a like, yeah, they like a lot of
institutions. Do you know, this is exactly a problem with Catholic Church or you know, governments that will say, well, we know we made a mistake, but we need people to trust us, so we can't admit our mistakes publicly because then people will see us in a bad light or something like that, you know, And and they're all to convinced themselves of doing the right thing for the greater cause, but of course it's not. Yeah, and I suspect or hope. I don't know that we are going to get
more of that story in live action with the Accolades show. Yeah, it takes place approximately one hundred years before Phantom Menace. That there's going to be some kind of Oh no, it's the Sith like, well, we better cover it up. Yeah, I think that may well happen. We'll see, we'll see one other character. I want to throw out something else that people mentioned in a Facebook post I put up about this, the character of
kill Monger in the movie Black Panther. You have t'chala and I think his first name is Eric I forget, I forget, But you know the person uh known as Killmonger, and they are both princes of Wakanda, but they have these incredible different upbringings and wind up going to incredibly different places. How much of that do you think is the different circumstances they had versus just being different people. Oh, we'll go, we'll go to nature versus nurture.
I mean that's kind of what a lot of this is about, right, Yeah, Uh, I mean the way it's presented I think a lot of it is which word do I want? A lot of it is nurture, right, because kill Monger is presented as a person who grew up in the United States of Oakland, I believe, yeah, and saw the racial inequity in this country. M h. And then once he came to be aware of the existence of wakana and their power, basically I asked like, why
why are you letting this happen out here? And and so without that experience, without his upbringing the United States, it's like he probably doesn't have those feelings, right, Well, certainly T'Challa has the exact opposite. Then he has a fairly you could say, a really wonderful upbringing, and you also
say a very entitled upbringing. But either way privileged, right yeah, well Kandon privilege yeah, And and so on the one hand, he's not driven by that anger, but also that he doesn't he doesn't have that same need to go out and fix these things until they're pointed out to him in that
same way. Yeah, to'challa doesn't see them. Probably he's never he's never experienced that, right, And and there again that's one of those situations where to kill Monger's father is killed in part to cover up and that these stories are never told. And I believe in the first movie, uh Nakia right like tries to tell him some of the stuff that's going on, and she's kind of like that moderate position of trying to trying to convey it's him before
Killmonger comes along. Yep, yep. So all right, well, this has been a great conversation, Riki, thank you so much. Any of the last comments you want to make or points you want to bring up, Yes, I want to ask Disney Star Wars to give me the show I want now of like post imperial fall, war crimes tribunals. I don't know.
I don't know if we did that at Star Wars, but we are getting some interesting storylines in like the Mando era of ex imperials still in power within the New Republic and Undermanda. We're getting we're getting the idea that there are some war crimes trials happening, but also a lot of people being forgiven if they will be kind of like good Republic citizens. You know, I think that, Yeah to me, I watched that one episode and I was like, why don't you give me a whole shit about this. This looks
phenomenal. Yeah, I mean, and I I kind of joked, but I think to some degree they need to do more with that idea to explain the first order. Yeah, because when when the when the post Wool movies came out, a lot of us were like, how did this happen? Like how was the how did the first Order just kind of like flip a switch and take over again? And they are starting to fill those gaps.
And I think a lot of those gaps have to be that the new the New Republic was not as good as you know, we would like to think it was. Well, I think it faced a very difficult question, which is and and you know throughout history, like democracies that are established in the wake of a recent overthrow authoritarianism have a very bad success rate, like they often will fall back into authoritarianism again, particularly if time isn't set spent setting
up democratic institutions and social institutions that can help carry it. A lot of nations of Africa are great examples of this, where the English and French and Belgians, in many cases quite intentionally, we're just like, Okay, you don't want to be an armpire or more we're just gone, We're not gonna do anything to help you transition. And a lot of the places there were elections held and those governments were seen as illegitimate, and then fairly quickly authoritarians
took over, often with either CIA or KGB support. And yeah, and so to me, this question of the new Republic of where it's like, yeah, what does it do because on the one hand, it wants to be super democratic, it wants to be not authoritarian, but then with their problems on the outer rim happening, how do you not be authoritarian but also not you know, if you don't impose law and order, does that mean the huts and and everyone else just takes so over? And how do you
find that balance that. It's a topic. It's starting to get explored in some books. The book what's it called Bloodline is one I think you would really really like. I think that's when we talked to it upfortunately, Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yep, But yeah, I would love to see that more explored further. The last thing I'll just say about this is do you know much about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission? I do not so it is a model that I want, I want us to
follow more in the real world. But I also think would really be applicable in a place like this because it's and I think it's one of those brilliant things Nelson Mandela ever did, which is he said, look, we need to really know the truth of all the terrible things that happened and are apartheid, and all the things that individual people did and that that collectively happened, but that if we're ever to heal as a society, this can't be about
now the black people are in power and so we're going to punish all the white people for all that they did to us. We need to heal and move forward. And so the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was all about exactly that. It's about learning the truth, finding ways to have reconciliation without it being
about punishing or like criminalizing the actions that happened under apartheid. And in some ways that's what I I think there are people who are like, wait a minute, people who are you know, doing horrible things that are apartheid got off the hook, and that's not fair, and I think there's some legitimacy to that but overall, I think it's looked at as much more successful way of getting past a terrible situation like what happened there than in a lot of
other places where they never really be able to get past you know, Okay, well we're in power now and we're so angry at you for what you did for fifty years and all this kind of stuff, And I think that that's the kind of thing that I feel like if that had happened, that might help prevent the First Order. And that's yeah, that's a story. Like I would love to now have another conversation about who's responsible for the First Order? And is it you know, is it just Palpatine and Snoke and
Kylo Wren? Is that Leah and Luke? Is it Luke for going off and doing his own thing? Is it the people that do Republic? It's mon Mathma? Yeah? I hate I hate to say it because I love her so much as a character, and especially like what's going on with her
character in and Or is amazing. But at least the way, you know, the books that we've read, like what they seem to be establishing is that Mon Mathma didn't have a plan or did not execute the plan well, like post fall of the empire and disbanded the military too quickly and too suddenly, and just thought that things would return to old old republic standards when when it's it's difficult to do that, like as you just said, like the
first generation after the fall of an authoritarian regime, I think it's very important to establish like ground rules and say and to shut out some of those old
members from power. Like I've talked in the past about how post imperial Japan, like the first prime minister after the US occupation was actually someone who was part of the old regime and was even charged with war crimes, convicted of war crimes like minor, you know, as minor as war crimes can be, but they're convicted of minor war crimes, and then became prime minister of post war Japan, and that you know, Japan is a country is peaceful,
but there are still like these tendencies, especially like in government that unfortunately, like I could see a return to like not necessarily empire, but definitely like an authoritarian, militaristic country. Yeah. Well, and certainly we're seeing that in a lot of parts of Europe right now, Eastern Europe especially but also you know, fascist parties in the Rising, Germany and here in the United States. So yeah, on that cheery note, thank you so much
listeners for being a part of this. You're fantastic as always, Riekey and I love having you be a part of this. As I said at the beginning, please think about becoming a member. You're gonna get bonus content. Reake and I are about to talk about the Accolyte for a few moments. Our hopes and fears about that. You get member free episode, member bonus episodes, and most importantly, you're helping to keep us going, keep our keep the lights on, all those other good things. So please become a
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